Mmmmmm...

Myself and my lovely wife made it to a Gala at the NAC this eve.

Ver' nice. Yo-Yo Ma, Pinchas Zukerman, and Viviane Hagner doing Glinka's overture from Russlan and Ludmilla, some Tchaikovsky (which, honestly, I never seem to get into), Faure, Saint-Saens, and Brahms' concerto for violin and cello in A minor (Op 102).

Yo Yo Ma, also to be honest, isn't really my kinda cello guy. Had a teacher a while back who probably predjudiced me a bit on this score--always complained Ma was too much of a showman, really grumbled when I told him I was listening to some of Ma's recordings of the Bach suites ("You will listen to Casales!", he growls, imperiously, in his still fairly heavy Russian accent). But it was impressive, all the same. Really liked Hagner's sound, and she and Ma really made the Brahms sing, to my (not especially educated) ear.

Gotta get out to this kinda thing more often, I really do.

His Dark Materials

Picked up the third volume (The Amber Spyglass) of Pullman's acclaimed trilogy this aft, and expect to read it sometime later this weekend.

Having read the first two volumes now, I can review Pullman positively enough, and say if you're an adult reader with a bit of taste who has some reason to take a look at young adult-level fantasy, this is probably one of your better bets--but I must also confess to my usual mystification at some of the truly rave reviews on the covers.

Dunno. I'm genuinely not striking a pose or anything--but I seem to have this experience more often than not. As in: read dust jacket blurbs, read reviews, hear respected people raving about what a marvellous, life changing experience was reading this work for them...

Then pick up and read the work in question yourself, and find an inventive, well-crafted piece of fiction--but nothing that quite evokes the literary ecstasy you'd have quite reasonably thought you were in for, given the reviews.

I can rave about maybe four or five books I've read in my entire life, as truly startling and memorable, and genuinely worthy of the excitement that seems so readily to pour from the pens of certain critical scribes. And I've read a lot of books. Sometimes, methinks, the critics get a bit carried away about things. (Life of Pi? Anyone? What the hell was that?)

Anyway. Passing on the hyperbole, my view: His Dark Materials, so far, is well-crafted and inventive. And Pullman's two principal protagonists are memorable, involving creations. Worth a look, certainly.

But that's it. That's all I'm sayin'. Not gonna raise your expectations past that.

Oh, give it the fuck up, Rove

Pffft.

Now, of course, it would be entirely unsupported by any evidence to suggest that Rove's been planting bugs in his own offices again, or anything like that.

... and, of course, it would just be rude to suggest this weasel would mug his own grandmother if he thought he could pin it on a rival campaign.

Give it up, ya wanker. No one's gonna buy it this time.

Lie, lie, lie

... this being, of course, the GOP strategy.

Yep. So I catch Rudy Giuliani on The Daily Show, whoring himself out to salvage the party chimp's pathetic flop of a debate performance, doing the same ole lie on a brand new day. Yeah Rudy, that's true, Saddam Hussein could, theoretically, since he was a kinda nasty guy with not insignificant quantities of money, have supported 'global terrorism' (and so, given those standards, could have Cheney, since he's pretty durn nasty too, at least from an aesthetic point of view, though I digress).

But he didn't.

No, Rudy, and you and the GOP can tell the lie until you're blue in the face, making your excuses for the quagmire that dare not speak its name until the cows come home, hell freezes over, and Dubya gets an advanced degree in 'nukyular' physics (all the better to grasp the finer points of yellow cake and aluminum tubes, one could hope), but Hussein's thuggery, as you would know, if you let reality into that weird doublespeak bubble of yours, was pretty focused on his domestic population--and, at worst, his immediate neighbours. And he got along with Al Qaeda about as well as I'd expect I'd get along with a miserable little lying worm like you.

Yeah, it's lovely they busted him, don't get me wrong. But it's the same dynamic as all of your infinitely malleable justifications for your favourite war: I'd be a lot happier about what you're doing and what you've done if I could rub two words of your explanations together without coming across yet another lie. And yes, our brave paladins, it's great you got the bad guy. But seeing as some of you and yours were his accessories not so long ago, I think this whole movie would make a lot more sense to the audience if those of you involved in helping him develop chemical weapons technology--and in passing his military the intelligence data that helped him target his shells--would check yourselves into the dock next to him, to answer for your part in the whole sordid, murderous business.

Seeing, as, apparently, your interest here is in justice.

Getting back to the 'Saddam in cahoots with the terrorists' BS -- what manner of satisfyingly blunt instrument, I find myself wondering rhetorically, is going to get it through these fucking twits' heads? Would it actually help any if someone were to pick them up and physically beat them with the intelligence dossiers? If an enraged mob of ex-analysts were to come to their homes, and forcibly rub their noses in the reports until they turned black from the toner, then would these bloody minded morons get it?

Or, as I suspect, is this lie/belief basically on the same plane as religion. Impervious to reason. It has to be so. Because we believe it.

And because so much is riding on our believing it. And because if we admit otherwise, people might catch on to how profligately and pointlessly we are spending human lives on this swamp of deceit and violence.

And that, one can only presume, would probably be bad news in the polls.

Grief and disgust go hand in hand, and wind their way like poisonous smoke around everything this administration touches.

Dependably incompetent

Yep, it does amuse me that Bushco(TM) has been doing its durndest to portray Kerry as lacking consistency...

The rejoinder, of late, of course, and the one that fits oh so well is okay, whether or not that's true, in Bush's case, consistency would hardly be a good thing...

I mean, let's face it, the most remarkable and notable point of consistency Bush can brag about is that he's been a consistent failure.

Yep. You can count on him there. Mark my words, y' kin depend on Dubya not to get the job done. Rock solid, that man is. Betwixt the ears, at least.

Lookin' for a reliable screwup? Look no further. Shrub's yer man. And he's no one issue guy, either. Screws up foreign and domestic policy with equal zeal and dependability. Incoherent in speech, incoherent in policy--a mumbling, mashed, incoherent tangle of ideological wishful thinking and stubbornly puritanical stupidity, through and through. No detail omitted. If it's a policy decision, and it can possibly be (a) first politicized and then (b) subsequently violently screwed up, it has been. Inept beyond measure, here's a man who can simultaneously fuck up the budget (let's blow it all on a war that has nothing to do with what we say it does), national security (let's use the same war to create a fresh new breeding ground for terrorists), civil liberties (let's suspend them all in the name of addressing said concerns re terrorists), and public health (yep, that thar' 'abstinence based' sex ed is a grand idee, yessir... and let's mess with the stem cell folks the same day, make it a double header), just to name a few, all at once, without hardly working up a sweat.

If you absolutely want it fucked up, well and truly, he's your man.

Yep. Count on Bushco. Eruptions you can set your watch to...

Jes' like Old Faithful.

Never do this

Re Is caffeine withdrawal a mental disorder?... well, yes... insofar as you'd have to be nuts to stop drinking the stuff...

Oh. So you say that was a rhetorical question.

My mistake.